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An essay donated by Joseph Robert
Jochmans

Hell, Heaven or Hype? - Six facts
about what will really happen in 2012

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Today's growing acceptance that the year 2012 will see the end of the world
is fueled by the general uncertainty about the direction that modern global
events are taking, as well as a dramatic upsurge in religious beliefs in an
impending apocalypse. A recent national poll found that 59 percent of all
Americans are firmly convinced that the final days for humanity will occur
during their lifetimes. Such a mindset is fertile ground for the 2012 doomsday
phenomenon that is now constantly bombarding us from everywhere - in group
symposiums, lectures, workshops, magazine and newspaper articles, best-selling
books, television specials, documentaries, movies, in the media news and across
the Internet.

What are we to make of all this? Here are a few sobering facts about 2012 by
which we can get a better idea about its many implications for the future:

Fact one:

The much publicized apocalyptic date of December 21, 2012 - claimed
by many researchers and authors to be the last day for the world designated in
the ancient Mayan calendar system - appears absolutely nowhere in all of ancient
classical Mayan literature.

Not many people are aware that this date was never recorded among all the glyph
inscriptions found in every Mayan temple built throughout Guatemala and the
Yucatan between five hundred and four thousand years ago.

In addition, none of the dozens of erected commemorative stelae or standing
stones - which have numerous calendar dates carved into them preserving
historical events at most key Mayan sites - include any future time references
to 2012 as pinpointing the end of the world.

What is more, conspicuously absent from the four Mayan inscribed codices that
managed to escape being burned by sixteenth century Spanish missionaries - known
as the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex and the Grolier Codex -
are there any written passages predicting what will happen in 2012.

And nowhere in the two traditional Mayan sacred texts - the Popul Vuh or Book of
Creation for the Quiche Mayas, and the Oracles of Chilam Balaam of Chumayel and
Tizimin - do we find any mention whatsoever of December 21, 2012 specifically
marking the end of the present age.

One claim made is that there exists a single very obscure inscription found on
Monument 6 at the minor Mayan site of Turtuguero in the Mexican state of Tabasco
that supposedly predicts events to take place in 2012. The major difficulties
with this text is that its miniscule size makes it nearly impossible to
decipher, and that it was also heavily damaged.

The time-cycle term Pik has been interpreted to be the same as a Baktun - see
FACT TWO below. But the truth is, more than likely Pik instead is a syncope for
an even longer cycle of time called a Pictun, equal to twenty Baktuns or
equivalent to 7,885 years. Thirteen of these means the prophesied time-length
extends into the future over 100,000 years, far beyond 2012.

"Four Ahaw third of Kankin" derives from a Short Count calendar, also found in the
Oracles of Chilam Balaam, that refers to a past cycle of 256 years of daily
predictions that were completed in the eighteenth century. Modern attempts have
been made to somehow apply the Oracles to the end-times of 2012. But an
examination of their post-Conquest origins demonstrates that the Oracles'
predictions were written specifically for the Mayan people suffering under
Spanish rule, and not for any later generations.

What we are left with in the rest of the Turtuguero text as to an actual
prophesied event is nothing more than a series of unrevealing and disjointed
word fragments.

Just how, exactly, this discovery is supposed to relate to 2012 is anyone's
guess. Besides, if as it is now being claimed that 2012 is to be the traumatic
harbinger of earth-shattering events, then why would it have been prophesied by
the Mayas with only a single barely readable inscription?

What we do know for certain is that the Mayan calendar and all its historical
variations did indeed once exist, and that it was utilized extensively by
ancient Mesoamerican priests and chroniclers during the heyday of their many
cultural expressions - including those of the Olmecs, Mayas, Teotihuacanos,
Itzas, Toltecs, Mixtecs, Zapotecs and Aztecs.

This calendar and its many forms was primarily cyclic in nature, composed of
several repeating rounds, each one of specific numbers of days, that were
continuously beginning and ending as the different cycles intermeshed with one
another on a daily basis.

Taken as a cohesive whole, the calendar's central theme was one of continuity,
whether it pertained to the annual cycle of religious celebrations, the planting
and harvesting of crops, the births and deaths of passing generations, or the
ongoing succession of local rulers and city state governments.

To make the claim that this calendar is going to suddenly and dramatically end
all at once violates the basic tenets of the Mayan concepts of life and time.

Instead, the present-day promotion of the 2012 doomsday date constitutes an
unrealistic projection of our modern fatalistic interpretation of history onto
an ancient mindset that once had a far better attitude about themselves and the
continuous fulfillment of their own destinies. We are the ones who are
anticipating some form of self-appointed apocalyptic termination, not the Mayas.

Fact two:

The supposed Mayan calendar end-date of December 21, 2012 is really
only an estimated calculation.

Because the Mayan time-count fell into disuse centuries ago and was only
recently rediscovered, there is no precise correlation between it and our modern
calendar, so that we are very uncertain just when the many Mayan time-cycles
start and finish. We are aware that one of the largest time-cycles, known as the
Thirteen Baktuns and equivalent to 5,126 years, began to be counted at some
point in the fourth millennium B.C.E. and is scheduled to be completed in the
next few years.

The presently accepted interlink between the Mayan calendar and our modern
Gregorian calendar is known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation, based
on the deciphering work of three respected Mayanologists. However, the
correspondences they came up with were each slightly different, so that the
final choice was really only a compromise. As it is, as new stelae calendar
dates are found and examined, several additional adjustments to the GMT
correlation have had to be made.

As a result, when the earliest calculations for the last day of the Long Count
calendar system were initially produced, the proposed dates all fell in the year
2011. The switch to 2012 has only been of recent origin because of further minor
tinkerings with the GMT correlation.

Even with this, however, there are still many professional disagreements. For
example, some researchers point to a 420-day error in the continuity of the Long
Count made by priests at the Mayan city of Palenque over 2,500 years ago that
has never been generally recognized and corrected.

Among the growing number of the more metaphysical of the self-proclaimed experts
in the field, there is also no end-date consensus of agreement. A survey of the
burgeoning myriads of Internet web-sites being devoted to this subject reveals
an ongoing undercurrent debate concerning what are the true beginning and
completion dates for the Mayan Baktun Long Count system. One large segment, for
example, is firmly convinced that the final date will come instead on October
28, 2011. Different other calculations have resulted in different end-times
ranging anywhere from 2010 to 2016, with a few even opting for 2024, 2029 or
2038.

More recently, a very slim majority of apocalyptic promoters have been the
loudest in vocalizing their choice of December 21, 2012, which now appears to be
the date both the general public and the media have grasped onto as well. Since
headlining a single concise doomsday date readily sells books, articles,
lectures and interviews, everyone else who has begun to jump onto the bandwagon
that promises commercial success has also accepted this date without question.
As a result, the unspoken common-held agreement for December 21, 2012 is
reinforcing the illusion of authenticity where none exists.

And this support of the main Baktun-based calendar completely ignores the fact
that other related Mesoamerican cultural calendars do not end on this same date.
As examples, the Tikal calendar round will supposedly end on April 2, 2012, a
full eight and a half months before the accepted Baktun time count, while the
Teotitlan calendar round is said to have already terminated on March 1, 1987.

As noted before, the very existence of any doomsday date stands in sharp
contrast to what the Mayan calendar was really all about. Like everything
cyclic, its inherent nature was one of endless repetition. We can recognize that
there will certainly be a day in our near future when the Thirteenth Baktun
grand round will come to its inevitable completion. But on the very next morning
the count will simply revert back to beginning with Baktun One, and the calendar
wheel will continue to turn again and move into the next several thousands of
years to come. In essence, the day numbers will change but time itself and the
life that is bound up within it will proceed uninterrupted.

If anything, the end of one cycle and the birth of another merely designates a
possible benchmark, one that pinpoints a potential time of transition. But what
kind of transition is determined by this change of cycles is nowhere defined or
clarified among the ancient Mayan texts.

The fact that we actually find a general absence of any verifiable ancient Mayan
prophecies about this specific cycle transition strongly suggests that nothing
was foreseen to happen. And all the hoopla and hype being presently stirred up
by publicity seekers trying to create their own doomsday drama will most likely
lead to December 21, 2012 being nothing more than a large universal non-event.

Does anyone remember the Harmonic Convergence of August 16 - 17, 1987? This was
another well-publicized non-event, based on an ancient Zapotec prophecy, that
also had apocalyptic overtones and generated gatherings of people at sacred
sites all over the globe. For many of these planetary pilgrims, the prophesied
two days was a very personal uplifting celebration that strengthened and
re-affirmed their own spiritual growth. But for the rest of the world as a whole
nothing cataclysmic took place at all. The ground refused to move, the sky did
not fall, and the world remained the same. The odds are in favor that December
21, 2012 is going to end up being the same experience.

Fact three:

There is no clear connection between the ending of the Mayan
calendar cycle and the Mayan concepts of what they called the Sun Ages or World
Ages.

Many ancient calendar stones and samples of sacred literature reflect on the
Mesoamerican belief in the cyclic nature of history. Most New World cultures
spoke of the existence of four or five former ages of time during which a
succession of bygone inhabitants were created, built forgotten civilizations and
eventually were destroyed amid a series of global destructions. The priests
looked forward to the coming completion of the present world age, but remained
generally silent about how it will end and what new world age will be born next

The only substantive prophecy we are left with concerning the fate of our
present world cycle is a single glyph found on the famed Aztec Sun Stone
calendar. It is called the Ollin and appears as a circle entwined by two
feathered ropes or bilateral symbols. Decipherers have translated this glyph as
signifying the idea of movement or transformation. Nothing more can be
extrapolated from this, though of course much speculation is running rampant
among present-day doom-and-gloomers who would like to interpret the Ollin as
some kind of foreboding for the imminent catastrophic demise of our present
civilization.

Yet nowhere is this enigmatic glyph directly linked with the ending of the
Baktun cycle itself. Some researchers have tried to stretch the point by making
the observation that the glyph in question appeared on a calendar stone, and
make the leap that therefore it must have something to do with the Mayan
calendar cycles. But the real fact remains that, as far as traditional Mayan
literature is concerned, their concept of world ages and their calendar cycles
appear to have been exclusive of one another. The world ages dealt with
universal time. The calendar cycles, in contradistinction, measured the passage
of everyday time.

And even if we were to concede that the coming time-cycle transition implies
some form of unspecified changeover, and that the one tantalizing glyph left to
us somehow does epitomize that changeover, its vague and unrevealing
connotations of movement and transformation fall far short of giving us any
clear indication of what might possibly happen.

For those who are searching for hidden correlations among the Mayan world ages,
calendar calculations as well as astronomical cycles, there is no common
agreement either. Some see a world age equivalent to a Thirteen Baktun count of
5,125 years. Others argue that a world age, by its very nature, must correspond
instead to a full wheel of the Precession of the Equinoxes or 26,000 years or
roughly equal to five Baktuns. But again, both concepts are unsubstantiated by
any Mayan calendar system and are purely speculative.

Clouding the issue further is the major disagreement among several of the
Mesoamerican cultures as to which world age we are really in. The traditional
Mayas taught that four previous ages have come and gone, and that we are
awaiting the dawn of the fifth. However, the Aztecs and other New World calendar
keepers insisted that we are presently in the fifth world age and that a sixth
age is now due. How many ages there were directly impacts how one measures the
time-count of the larger calendar cycles. If one assumes an interconnection,
then until the question of the number of ages is resolved, the problem
concerning calendar beginning and ending dates cannot be adequately settled.

Most significant is the attitude taken by most living Mayan tribal Elders about
the Long Count and its deeper meaning. The Elders are very much aware of the
existence of the old calendar system of their ancestors, and they also recognize
that its Baktun count is coming to an end in the very near future. But they
emphasize that they neither possess nor make any apocalytic predictions about
what is ahead, declaring instead that life and time will continue on as it has
whenever the grand cycle renews itself.

There are 440 tribes among the Native Mayas of Guatemala and the Yucatan, each
of which has their officiating Elders, who in turn all together make up what is
called the Mayan Council. They are the ones who decide what aspects of the
ancient wisdom of their forefathers can be released and what is to be used only
among their people.

At last report, there are at least five prophetic calendars that are being kept
secret, and for good reason. The Elders are concerned that the growing obsession
about 2012 in the larger world is becoming a magnet for the collective fears of
humanity, and that the transformative value that might be focused on by the
upcoming change of calendar cycles is being lost. They are reluctant to release
any further information because of its potential for misinterpretation and
misuse.

Adding to the confusion, the honest words of these Elders are being drowned out
amid the more publicized prophetic pronouncements made by several of their Mayan
brothers who have joined the lucrative lecture circuit business, billing
themselves as New Age shamans, and who are now caught up in the present frenzied
fad of 2012 doom-saying. They do their Elders and their people a grave injustice
by misrepresenting the ancient beliefs in the continuity of the future.

Some of the more vocal of the Mayan Elders have publicly spoken out against the
promoters of 2012 because of their concentration on specific dates as a time of
destruction. The Elders themselves support no one date as the end of the
Thirteen Baktuns calendar for a very good reason - they have no idea when it
will be.

One of the tribal calendar systems, in fact, will not come to an end until March
31, 2013, while most of the others in use also have different termination dates.

The Elders admit that the Long Count fell into disuse among their ancestors even
before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, and over time they lost
continuity with their past. And if, as the Elders point out, they are not sure
of the grand cycle completion date, then it certainly remains unknown to any of
the non-traditional non-Mayan instant experts who are rallying around the 2012
banner. They insist that the indigenous Mayas have the true calendars and they
alone know how to accurately interpret them - not as instruments of doom and
gloom, but instead as vehicles for transformation.

As one Elder Day Keeper bluntly put it, the world will not end in 2012. The
world will end only when the sun finally goes out a very long time from now.

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Fact four:

At the winter solstice sunrise on December 21, 2012, our sun will
not precisely cross over the center of our galaxy.

When we speak concerning the movement of the sun through the Precession of the
Equinoxes, we are talking about an extremely slow, almost imperceptible shift
which takes 26,000 years in order to complete one circuit through the Zodiacal
constellations. For this reason, the passage of the solar body through the Milky
Way stars that straddle the galactic plane cannot be defined as a single
specific moment but rather as a period of time.

As a few proponents of the 2012 prophecies have reluctantly admitted, the sun's
journey through the galactic cloud of stars is already happening. The initial
entrance of the upper rim of the sun's circumference into the galactic field
began in 1980 and the lower rim of the sun's edge will not completely depart
until 2016. If, as some claim, the paramount defining moment is when the center
of the solar disk perfectly conjuncts the center of the galactic field, then
this has already occurred, in 1998. It was observed and verified by several
modern astronomers.

Thus, the end-date of the Mayan calendar system, which is supposed to happen at
any time between 2010 and 2016 or even later, does not coincide with the exact
centering of the sun with the middle of the galactic field. At best, all we can
say for sure is that the period of time that marks the transition in the Mayan
calendar from one grand cycle into another, only generally parallels the latter
half of the period of time when the sun will still be traversing the Milky Way
stars. Other than this, there is nothing else that can be inferred from this
occurrence.

The upper portion of the galactic star field has what some astronomers describe
as the Dark Rift, a sliver of a blank region that certain New Age teachers have
identified as the womb of our galaxy. They believe that when the sun enters
here, it will symbolize a new birth experience for the world. The problem is,
our solar body already entered the Rift beginning in 2007. By 2012 the sun will
be leaving the Rift to enter the last segment of the galactic star field. So
once again, the timing of the alignment and the calendar end-dates do not
coincide.

A recent attempt has been made to link the sun's odyssey through the galactic
plane with a number of obscure symbols and pictographs portrayed among a series
of monuments located at a minor early Mayan site called Izapa. But this is only
a single person's interpretation, and one that stretches its credulity to fit
the 2012 prophecy bias of its author. Experts in Mayan glyph decipherment point
to a number of other possible meanings that correlate much better with
traditional Mayan religious concepts, and which have nothing to do with 2012 or
any other future events.

Likewise, there have been claims made that the solar-galactic alignment was not
only the basis of the Mayan calendar - which itself has never been adequately
proven - but that it was also the foundation of all calendar systems around the
world. This statement is untrue, for we know that such calendar systems as those
of the Cherokee and the ancient Egyptians were not calculated by the sun's
precessional position in relation to the galactic center found near Sagittarius,
but were instead measured by the sun's relation to the galactic anti-center,
located near the Pleiades and Orion, on the exact opposite side of the heavens.
There is no way that one can be identified as being the same as the other, nor
can a common end-date be calculated from both.

Fact five:

There will be no convergence of terrestrial or celestial disasters
occuring all at once on December 21, 2012. Neither will this date
herald the advent of some form of global ecstatic leap in our collective
consciousness that will suddenly usher in a golden age of instant spirituality.

The growing phenomenon of belief in 2012 as the terminal year has drawn to it
three major groups who are all suffering from one form or another of
eschatophobia, or a fear of the end of the world.

On one hand is what might be called the schadenfreude group - those who take joy
in looking forward to coming disaster - who can point to an impressive array of
possible cataclysms that they predict with great certainty will totally wipe out
humanity many times over in a single day.

These coming catastrophes include the eruption of a super-volcano or the
triggering of a world-wide super-quake, the sudden melting of all ice at both
poles resulting in the flooding of every global coastline and coastal city, the
collapse of the Earth's geomagnetic field or a reversal of its physical axis,
the advent of a world-wide pandemic disease and a devastating famine to follow,
the collapse of all international economies and political powers, the appearance
of an Antichrist or global dictator, the beginning of World War III or
Armageddon, the impact of a large asteroid or comet to hit the planet, a coming
of a giant solar flare that will burn up the globe, the explosion of a nearby
star in a supernova that will bathe the entire Earth in lethal radiation, and
the arrival of a mega-burst of cosmic rays from the center of our galaxy.

What we can say for sure is that there will always exist a potential chance for
any one of these events to happen separately and by themselves in our near or
far future. Based on the precarious nature that the continuance of life has
always had on this planet during our geologic past, today we are no less
constantly faced with the same possibilities of extinction from moment to
moment. But the likelihood, as some forecasters are actually predicting, that
this full spectrum of disasters is going to happen all at once, and on December
21, 2012, borders on the absurd.

On the opposite extreme is a second group of people composed of those who are
simply waiting for some vaguely-defined yet traumatic flash of spiritual
enlightenment that will strike everybody in a single instant, and will transform
the entire world into one big Eden-like ashram. Most of these individuals are
leftover New Age meditators literally re-cycled from the Harmonic Convergence of
twenty years ago, who failed to comprehend the deeper personal significance of
what happened then, and will most likely misunderstand it again when the Mayan
calendar comes to its completion.

Sadly, there are a number of metaphysical teachers with messianic complexes who
are taking advantage of the gullibility of those who are looking for an ecstatic
quick fix to the problems in their lives, and who are refusing to take
responsibility for their own spiritual growth. By claiming that 2012 will give
birth to an inevitable instantaneous global paradise and age of peace, these
teachers are offering a simplistic solution to more complex life issues, that in
the end will have disastrous personal consequences for many of their followers.
What they are setting up is a multitude of individual apocalypses on the psyche
and soul levels that will erupt once the expectation bubble for these people
finally bursts. This may be the one real unfortunate legacy that December 21,
2012 could bring about.

Not to be outdone, there is a third set of believers in 2012 who actually look
forward to both Hell and Heaven happening together, that the coming spectrum of
disasters and the sudden advent of spiritual enlightenment are somehow dependent
on one another. These end-of-the world disciples are firmly convinced that
momentous global disasters must happen first before everyone will be ready to be
collectively transformed for the better. For these people, in order to be able
to move from kriyanoia or present consciousness into metanoia or changed
consciousness, they are fully prepared to pass through paranoia along the way.

What this third group has failed to realize is that the future is not
single-tracked but is multi-tracked. Everything that happens tomorrow ultimately
depends on what we do today. And we have the power to change the future by
changing ourselves first in the here and now. No individual is preordained to
follow only one line of fulfillment, but has many routes into the future they
can manifest for themselves. The true purpose of prophecy is to offer us a
glimpse of what different pathways exist so that we may make a better choice of
what direction we can take. And it is our ability to make choices that is the
greatest power in the universe. We are our own prophecy continually being
fulfilled.

In the last analysis, what the final truth will be is that neither Hell nor
Heaven are going to be obtainable quite so easily. They are not going to be
served to us on a silver platter. Whichever one we choose to bring about through
our actions or inactions is going to be solely the results of our own personal
and collective efforts or failures. And the consequence of potential happenings,
whatever they will be, are certainly not going to take place according to some
predetermined schedule of prophesied events for 2012.

Fact six:

The bogus end-of-the-world Mayan prophecy for December 21, 2012 finds
no parallels with similar prophecies that supposedly exist among several
cultures and religions in other places of the world.

First of all, there are absolutely no visionary writings in the Bible, whether
Old Testament or New Testament, by which one can juggle the many cryptic
prophetic time lengths given and thereby calculate a legitimate end-date of
2012.

As an orthodox Rabbi who is an eminent Biblical scholar once quipped -
commenting on the fundamentalist Christian obsession with trying to calculate
the exact date for the Last Day by endlessly combining unrelated numerical
references in Scriptures - if you multiply the number of the Beast in the Book
of Revelations by how many rungs there are on Jacob's Ladder in the Book of
Genesis, you can forecast what the Dow Jones industrial average will be in the
Stock Market. This kind of Bible-based fuzzy math, he remarked, will produce any
apocalyptic date you like - to which, we might add, 2012 can be included.

The date 2012 does happen to appear in the so-called Bible Code, but so does a
dozen other apocalyptic endings as well - including for 2010, 2014, 2113 and
2126. The chief problem is that the Bible Code is based on a false premise. Its
method of computer skip-letter permutations actually allows for any name or
event or date to be eventually found and spelled out.

As a revealing verification of this, computer experts applied the same principle
used in the Bible Code to Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick, and discovered in
the resulting printouts the names and dates for the deaths of John F. Kennedy,
Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Indira Gandhi and Princess Dianna.

To be able to prophesy practically everything that might possibly happen, is not
itself a prophecy.

There are certain Jewish and Christian pseudographia works that claim that the
duration of the world will be for seven thousand years, based on the seven days
of Creation in Genesis symbolizing a thousand years each. But if this is true,
then, according to the Jewish calendar, Anno Mundi 8000 will not come until A.D.
2240, while the fundamentalist Christian calculations for the end of the world,
based on Biblical chronology, should not happen until A.D. 3000. In either case,
2012 was missed again.

Looking at the Hindu prophetic time count, which like the Mayan calendar is also
composed of great cycles and ages, we discover that it contains no reference to
2012 as a terminal date. Instead, the end of the present Age of Kaliyuga, as
determined by traditional Hindu scholars, is not scheduled to end for another
430,000 years. A more concise cycle, called the Lesser Kaliyuga, will not be
completed until 2082. The date of 2012 is off by seven decades.

Again, we find absolutely no indication in five thousand years of ancient
Egyptian hieroglyph inscriptions of a prophecy about 2012. Likewise, in the
prophetic time-line demarcated in the passageway system inside the Great
Pyramid, is there anything specifically pointing to 2012 as an ending date. In
fact, the Pyramid's future time-line continues on all the way to the 83rd
century.

Other than the solar crossing of the galactic field of stars - which as we have
already seen fails to exactly coincide with 2012 - modern astrologers do not
foresee anything very dramatic occurring in the heavens that will distinguish
2012 as a year that is particularly fatalistic. Enthusiasts for the 2012
end-of-the-world like to point to the conjunction of Venus with the Pleiades and
its chief star, Alcyone, in that year. However, when we look more closely at a
sky chart of the coming Pleiadean encounter, Venus in 2012 will actually be
approaching more to the south of the Seven Sisters. We will have to wait until
2036 before Venus will nearly be on top of Alcyone. Here is another miss in
correlations.

Hopi prophecy, as well as most other Native American visionary lore, forecasts a
choice of how our present age could end, but gives no time frame whatsoever as
to when these events could happen.

Nowhere among either the quatrains or prose prophecies of Nostradamus did the
sixteenth century French seer make a specific reference to 2012 as being the end
of the world. Rather, he made dated forecasts all the way to the year A.D. 9000
and beyond.

An attempt was recently made to identify a book manuscript full of badly drawn
pictures discovered in Rome as having been authored by Nostradamus. Despite the
filming of two documentaries about the manuscript by a major cable television
channel - and their attempt to interpret some of its artwork as symbolizing a
coming apocalypse in 2012 - a thorough independent investigation of the
manuscript shows conclusively that the book and its pictures is a poorly made
modern forgery, and that Nostradamus had nothing to do with it.

Finally, not anywhere among the prophecies written by such famed visionaries of
the past as Saint Malachy, Mother Shipton and Edgar Cayce do we find a single
mention of a 2012 last date. Cayce even looked forward to his rebirth in 2158.

The end result is, the more we search the less we find. There are no termination
prophecies from anywhere else in the world that can be used to bolster the proof
for the Mayan calendar end-date prophecy - which, in the final analysis, does
not really exist either. In essence, there are no foundations for the 2012
doomsday date whatsoever. The deeper we investigate, the more all evidence for
it vanishes, and what we are finally left with are unfounded facts and sheer
speculations that really are a stark repudiation of the whole 2012 concept.

So what will really happen in 2012? Probably nothing at all. And when the
would-be prophets are left to pick up the pieces of disappointment, more than
likely they will cover their embarrassment by claiming the end-date calculations
were wrong, or better yet that 2012 was indeed significant but that disaster was
miraculously averted. Either way, a new doomsday foreboding will be heralded for
farther in the future, and the pathway of paranoia will be blindly followed by
many all over again.

We are reminded of what happened to a New England preacher, William Partridge,
who in 1695 distributed a religious tract prophesying that the world was about
to come to an end in 1697. In 1698 he released another tract, this one claiming
that the world had indeed ended in 1697 but that no one had cared to take
notice.

The bottom-line message here is that it is time to put aside the foolish
self-serving soothsayings of pseudo-experts and teachers. The time has come
instead for each and every person to focus on their own private individual
spiritual growth. The real answers to life's mysteries do not exist outside of
us - especially when they are being dictated by those whose main purpose is only
to generate fear and try to make money off of it.

Ultimately, the answers we are seeking are already inside us, in our spiritual
core where our true selves continually dwell, and our inner wisdom may be
discovered and revealed through our own searching.

It is only here, in our centers within, that we will find the truth about our
personal destinies in a world of spiritual reality that has no end, only a
constant beginning.